Del Toro is at it again, presenting fairy-tale horror in all its lavish excess and beauty. He's also embedded a pro-liberty message into the film, as he seems to be fond of doing. The private-sector-financed Jaeger team in Pacific Rim, the psychological horrors of war in Pan's Labyrinth, and now the revival of gothic horror with a particular sort of Romantic feminist flavor.
This is old-fashioned gothic, by the way. The fact that Del Toro doesn't even bother to keep the plot mysterious is smart. Instead of being unpredictable, his stylishness grants us permission to truly savor the horror of its gothic setting.
The contrast between American enterprise and English aristocracy could not be more stark.
The first act of the film takes place in the up-and-coming, turn of the century Buffalo, NY - an interesting choice, given how that city looks today. A young woman named Edith takes a liking to a newly-arrived Englishman who nevertheless fails to find anyone to invest in his building of a machine used for mining. It seems clear that he means to woo Edith and marry her for her money, a plot that his sister no doubt has a hand in.
This is the very predictable plot: a washed-up Aristocrat on his last dime turns to the exploitation of a young girl who does have money, because he doesn't have what it takes to compete.
And that's it. There's really nothing more to it than that, other than the (spoiler alert) incestuous love affair with his sister. But even that's not hard to see coming.
I really like this technique. A lot of people may gripe that the poor girl should have seen all this coming, but isn't that part of the point? That in the face of all evidence to the contrary, trusting a man whose house is literally falling apart and seems to have a paranormal infestation of spirits is a little bit insane.
I say look a little closer.
Something that Scorcese did with Shutter Island is relevant here. If you recall the first image of that film, it was of Leo De Caprio's character vomiting into a bucket. In the first frame, he's telling you that the protagonist is sick. He practically spells it out for you, and still some complained about an ending that - if you had been paying attention - should not have been that hard to see coming. That film was more about why he is sick, and those reasons are for another article.
So you already know how this film will end. You may not know the sequence of events, but you know how it will end. What the attentive viewer then gets to relish is the subtext. The purpose that brings us here.
Period horror is inherently gothic. When has there ever been a period horror film that actually glorified the past, as if it was somehow better and more noble? Most period films seek to draw parallels between behaviors we ought to have gotten rid of by now with times in which we demonstrated a total lack of concern for it. Think of Kathy Bates's pro-slavery character in the third season of American Horror Story and you get the gist.
The horrifying social traditions being skewered in Crimson Peak are fairly obvious: the social death of matrimony for some women, the ignoble and pathetic reliance on other people's money (inherited or otherwise), and the dismissal of a woman's ability to educate herself without help from a man.
In fact, I think this film firmly declares itself capital-R Romantic, as opposed to tamer forms of gothic fiction that existed back then. Actually, it literally does this in a scene early on in the movie. When Edith meets the Englishman's sister for the first time, once again the subtext of women's issues rises to the level of text. The woman, seeing that Edith fancies herself a writer, compares her to Jane Austen, but Edith rebukes this association.
She prefers Mary Shelly. Why the distinction?
Because Austen was only playing at the problem of social institutions that harm women, but Mary Shelly was a Romantic that truly believed that women were every bit the equal that men were. They didn't just have their "place" in society, they were truly free to be whomever they chose to be.
There are other differences. Austen was a moralist that wanted men and women to act a certain way, and seemed to pick and choose which social customs were "proper" and "moral" for both men and women. She was progressive enough to point out cruelty towards women and didn't want to see them treated as second-class citizens, but she was not radical enough to blame the very structure of society, without which the Aristocrats at the center of her stories would surely suffer.
Mary Shelly, by contrast, based her horrible treatment of Frankenstein's monster off of the way orphans, outcasts, unmarried and widowed women, and many other types of socially dead people were actually treated. She was also not afraid to portray men and women as truly independent and individualistic. Rational but also empathic. Beautiful but at times cruel. There was no specific morality promoted in her work, but simply showed men and women at their best and at their worst.
And Edith is certainly more like Shelly. Although the American doctor-turned-investigator spends the whole film figuring out that Edith is in trouble and does eventually arrive to help her, he proves to be utterly useless. By this point, she's already figured out the mystery on her own. She also saves herself and, by doing so, saves the doctor, too.
Austen's worldview would have required her to do the moral taming of her arrogant male counterpart, while he got her all learned up and stuff about worldly matters. The doctor does figure it out, but he doesn't need to explain it to Edith.
The fact that Edith is totally naive - thinking that moving in to a creepy English castle is anything to be smiling about - is necessary. The point is for her to learn the horror of her situation on her own, and that's exactly what she does.
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